Here are the top updates from Saturday:

  1. Goa has allowed tourists to enter the state if they are fully vaccinated or have a negative RT-PCR report, reported Mint. The state currently has 992 active Covid-19 cases, an official from the state health department said.
  2. India registered 38,268 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday morning, taking the tally of infections to 3,18,95,385 since the pandemic broke out in January last year. The new cases were 13.47% lower than Friday’s count of 44,643. The country’s toll rose to 4,27,371 as it recorded 617 deaths in the last day. The number of active cases stood at 4,12,153, while the tally of recoveries reached 3,10,55,861.
  3. Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya announced that pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine has received emergency-use authorisation in India. “This will further boost our nation’s collective fight against Covid-19,” he said.
  4. The Karnataka government has announced a weekend curfew in eight districts bordering Kerala and Maharashtra, the Hindustan Times reported. The restrictions will be applicable in the districts of Belagavi, Bidar, Vijayapura, Kalaburagi, Dakshina Kannada, Kodagu, Mysuru, and Chamarajanagar.
  5. The Maharashtra government is planning to ease more Covid-19 related curbs in the coming days, but will do so with utmost caution, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said, according to News18. The government will also take a decision on permitting more people to travel by local trains, Thackeray said.
  6. Over 2.29 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses are available with states, union territories and private hospitals, the Union health ministry said, according to PTI. The ministry said that more than 51.66 crore doses have been provided to states and Union territories through all sources and 55,52,070 more doses are in the pipeline.
  7. The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the Covid-19 virus was first reported, has collected samples of over 11.23 million people to test them for the novel coronavirus, Xinhua reported. The city had not reported any locally transmitted cases for over a year until August 2, when seven people tested positive for the virus.
  8. United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson will not go into self-isolation after a member of his staff tested positive for Covid-19 during a trip to Scotland, BBC reported. A statement from the prime minister’s office said that the visit was carried while adhering to coronavirus-related protocols, and Johnson did not come in close contact with the staff member.
  9. The pace of development in India continued under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership even as development came to a halt in the world, PTI quoted Union Home Minister Amit Shah as saying. “We fought strongly against coronavirus and even won the fight, and at the same time, carried on with the development,” Shah said.
  10. Globally, Covid-19 has infected more than 20.19 crore people and caused 42.82 lakh deaths since the pandemic broke out in December 2019, according to Johns Hopkins University.